We Mostly Feel Sadness and Fear Right Now

Yesterday, I flipped an article into my news magazine from Axios.  The article is so short I will quote all of it here:

"An Italian-based artificial intelligence company is regularly analyzing social media posts about the coronavirus for their emotional content.

"Why it matters: Classifying tens of thousands of posts by their emotional tone provides a snapshot of how people feel about the pandemic. Spoiler alert: not great!

"How it works: Expert System specializes in semantics and natural language reading, a branch of AI involving computer systems that attempt to make sense of written language.
 
"In doing so, a computer can rapidly analyze vast amounts of the written word — like, for example, a day's worth of social media posts about the COVID-19 pandemic.

"For the past few weeks, Expert System has been collecting English language social media posts each day that feature frequently used hashtags like #coronalockdown and #covid19. Its AI can extract the emotional content of those posts, which is then analyzed and interpreted by Sociometrica.
 
"On April 24, 'fear' had become the single most widespread emotion, displacing 'sadness.'

"But, but, but: Such negative feelings have been declining over the past 10 days, from 62.4% to 45.5%. At the same time, neutral and positive feelings are on the rise, with particular growth around posts showing "hope."
 
"Also increasing in intensity is "health fanaticism," which Expert System defines as "a feeling of fear and anxiety around certain aspects of health and an emphasis on defending the health of one’s own body."

"The bottom line: A natural language AI can tell you what you probably already know: the pandemic is terrible, but if you squint hard enough, there's light at the end of the tunnel."

The day fear replaced sadness as the most pervasive emotional tone was the day US deaths from COVID-19 passed 50,000. 

The color-coded graphic at the top depicts the various "emotional tones" in proportion to each other.  Obviously, sadness and fear consume about one-third of our emotional tone right now.  That isn't too surprising and it totally relevant in a pandemic situation.

But, I spent a lot of time looking at the smaller pockets of emotional tone.  What was the dynamic range of this moment in time?  Which emotions were most expressed?  The graphic is difficult to read.  Here are the Top 50 emotions according to this graphic.  I attempted to order them according to the degree of their prevalence on the chart.  It is interesting...

1)  Sadness
2)  Fear
3)  Hope
4)  Anxiety
5)  Success
6)  Love
7)  Amusement
8)  Desire
9)  Health Fanaticism
10)  Hatred
11)   Impoliteness
12)   Neglect
13)   Stress
14)   Pride
15)   Confusion
16)   Action
17)   Happiness
18)   Anger
19)   Shame
20)   Spirituality
21)   Trust
22)   Excitement
23)   Methodology
24)   Surprise
25)   Courage
26)   Affection
27)   Like
28)   Repulsion
29)   Dissolution
30)   Dynamic
31)   Joy
32)  Traditionalism
33)   Modernism
34)   Satisfaction
35)   Positivism
36)   Relief
37)   Irritation
38)   Disappointment
39)   Exasperation 
40)   Calm
41)   Extroversion
42)   Consideration
43)   Compassion
44)   Politeness
45)   Remorse
46)   Offense
47)   Disgust
48)   Suffering
49)   Boredom
50)   Relax

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this list is how infrequently "boredom" sets the tone.  Everyone I talk to seems to be bored to some extent.  I suppose on social media you don't go there to express your boredom, you go there to become engaged in other things.

I suppose the Top 25 or so of these are a mixture of what most people express in social media all the time, each jockeying up and down the list according to the individual and global situation.